Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday April 07, 2010 @12:46AM
from the edible-games-are-the-future dept.

destinyland writes "Dr. Jane McGonigal of the RAND Corporation's Institute for the Future has created a game described as 'a crash course in changing the world.' Developed for the World Bank's 'capacity development' branch, EVOKE has already gathered more than 10,000 potential solutions from participants, including executives from Procter & Gamble and Kraft. '[Dr. McGonigal] takes threats to human existence — global food shortage, fuel wars, pandemic, refugee crisis, and upended democracy — and asks the gaming public to collaborate on how to avoid these all too possible futures.' And by completing its 10 missions, you too can become a World Bank Institute certified EVOKE social innovator. (The game designer's web site lays out her ambitious philosophy. 'Reality is broken,' but 'game designers can fix it.')"

I know that when I am sitting on my computer playing games I don't eat often. I am only hungry when Its loading, but now that I have a fast computer loading times are too fast to grab something to eat.

Sorry, but that sounds a bit naive to me. America is the model for 'enough energy' - it has had an abundance of cheap (to the point of being effectively free) energy for the last 50 years, and has not solved every problem - not even providing the 'universal good health' care to its citizens that you mention.

If you gave cheap energy to the third world, I suspect it would just turn Bangladesh into Baltimore. Sanjeev would take his 5 kids to school in a 2 tonne SUV, they'd dine on drive-through Micky-D

I agree. Sanjeev can't be trusted to make those sort of choices. Let's keep him impoverished until we can figure out how to make him smarter and less greedy than Joe Baltimore. I'm thinking maybe mass hypnosis, or perhaps put something in the water supply. What's your idea?

Following a train of logic that suggest that a world full of healthy people equates to a world of smart people is entirely false. It only ensures a world where idiots have enough energy to pursue stupid plans longer.

Yeah,uh, it sounds like there are no gun as imagined in a perfect U.N. governed world.Then theres the goal of becoming a "World Bank Institute certified EVOKE social innovator".Sounds like a lame attempt at indoctrinating children into Big Brothers Brave New Socialist World.My solution is for players to arm up with BFGs, attack World Bank, defeat U.N. forces, overthrow sypathetic governments and free the world from the tyranny of socialism. Then everyone would be free to start over again with the current st

We do that already. They're called "UN Aid stations" or "soup kitchens" for those without money. Those with higher levels of credits can use "restaurants", "grocery stores", or even procure player housing with built-in stations.

... and have checkpoints where we can save our status.

There's an autosave but you can't restore.

Wait wait! I just thought of another thing that would help. Spawn points.

I do not understand why these non-gamers or casual gamers think about changing the games all the time. I am an hardcore gamer and I will buy the product. Go save the real world not our fantastic world.

I do not understand why these non-gamers or casual gamers think about changing the games all the time. I am an hardcore gamer and I will buy the product. Go save the real world not our fantastic world.

Non-gamer - I've seen the TED talk she did, and she is most definitely a gamer of the 'hardcore' variety. Was actually quite funny to feel her relief when she realised some of the audience were gamers too and were getting some of the references she was making.

Hmm my initial impression was wrong. So far its sole purpose appears to be to waste time by engaging in activities a 10 year old might find fun, and to learn about 'how to be a social innovator' - no actual outlets for innovation, just 'post blogs and fill out forms to get spammed'. Hopefully it will actually provide something worthwhile in the future.

I wanted to check it out for myself, so I clicked on the link in the summary. Alas, I was sent to a rather luridly written piece by a one "Surfdaddy Orca", which I was certainly not looking for.Thus, I have googled it for you, dear reader, and thus present without (much) further ado... the link to the Evoke game's website itself!

Write a video game, make some money. Give your money to the people starving to death. The laws of Supply and Demand basically say that if you make more people with higher demand, supply will be made to reach it. There is enough land on Earth to feed everyone if it was farmed, but it isn't farmed because you can't get rich feeding people with no money.

I sort of research in this area (only sorta, but enough to keep up and know about half the people in it). So I can't help but throw out some additional resources, which you can interpret as "stuff I like".

FWIW, the general idea is usually referred to as "serious games" [wikipedia.org], with a bunch of terms like "persuasive games", "games for change", "games with a purpose", "political games", "news games", etc. having more specific meanings.

I personally rather like Ian Bogost's [bogost.com] book [amazon.com] on the subject, which, contrary to a lot of stuff in this space, is more measured in talking about both the possible benefits and likely pitfalls. Although I love the idea and think it has a lot of promise, I've got to admit most attempts to make "serious" or "political" or "world-changing" games fall flat. Anyone played McCain's 2004 campaign game, "John Kerry Tax Invaders"? It's exactly what you think it is: a space-invaders clone with John Kerry tax bills coming down at you, in place of aliens. Hilarious, but kind of stupid. So I think it's important to not be fan-boyish about it, and figure out what would make the medium actually flourish for these sorts of purposes. (FWIW, Bogost also has a former blog [bogost.com] on "games with an agenda", and a interesting Colbert appearance [colbertnation.com]).

An interesting precursor is Chris Crawford's [wikipedia.org] 1980s games, which tackled subjects like the Cold War and the environment in interesting ways. He's now giving away a.txt of a book [erasmatazz.com] describing the design behind Balance of Power (1986), still something of a high-water mark in combining the simulation genre with attempts to really make people think about the real world.

For more recent games, specifically in response to news events, some of which have activist content and some of which are just commentary, there's also a newsgame index [gatech.edu]. In addition, there's a recent paper [digra.org] discussing whether and how newsgames might become the 21st century's equivalent of political cartoons.

I'm super-serial [wikipedia.org] here. The purpose of these games isn't to teach people to think up original solutions, it's to indoctrinate them into the groupthink of the person that commissioned the game, and decided the rules and the criteria for winning.

Maybe that makes players think about the issue, but that's incidental. Rewarding Goodthink does not make for radical "solutions" like (for example) Lovelock's answer to the alleged climate change problem: build walls round the big cities and "enjoy life while you c [bbc.co.uk]

Did you even read the article or look at the game the article is about? The objectives and actions in the game are far too open-ended to be called a groupthink training program like some of the others in the genre may be.

[Dr. McGonigal] takes threats to human existence [...] and asks the gaming public to collaborate on how to avoid these all too possible futures.

Um... I don't even need a game. Let's take a look at... Oh, Africa.
Problem: Little economy, disease, etc. (Ignoring the issue of "poverty"--just because they don't live like us doesn't mean it's a problem. Also education: exactly why do you need Western education to farm?

Ignoring the issue of "poverty"--just because they don't live like us doesn't mean it's a problem.

Poverty in this case means starvation and death rather than not having a Wii.

Also education: exactly why do you need Western education to farm? But I digress.

Because farming requires education. Otherwise the farmers use slash and burn tactic which cause irreparable long term damage to their own land. It also allows for an infrastructure to be maintained, a proper government to exist, provided basic knowledge of medicine (ie: condoms bloody work), a working democratic process and so on.

Trying to fix the "problems" without going for the true underlying causes is how you end up with the sh

I'm inclined to disagree here... while these 'uneducated' people may not be able to solve the issue in it's entirety, they have one significant advantage; perspective. Some of the greatest technologies we have today were made not by the 'educated' people who were busy looking at the problem, but by someone having an unusual perspective on the issue which all the rest wrote off before even thinking about it.

This 'game' gives the opportunity for all those -other- perspectives to get a little light, and maybe,

I think "activist games" aren't really the future, but games that make people think about interrelationships are. Even Sim City has a lot of subtle elements to it, and it wasn't even intended as a "serious" game.

Except for the part where the game designer gets to choose how the "subtle issues" are connected in a "complex interconnected system", I am sure you are right.

Take that stupid "kill the terrorist and make more terrorists" game. The group that made said game had an agenda and the rules of their game did not conform to reality but rather to their agenda. Their game ignored the fact that terrorists kill people, so the terrorists in the game never formed their own group of enemies.

I'm sorry, but you're too late. World poverty is already history thanks to
Bob [wikipedia.org]. But there's still some of the world's diseases up for grabs, but the downside is you have to be able to sing...

Video game designers have a hard enough time creating hunger, disease, and poverty. At least realistically. You don't see part of Liberty City get poorer as drug lords thrive. You don't see the bums lunge at the hot dog carts. In X zombie game you don't see the virus spread through an un-inoculated population.

Maybe that's why the game looks a lot more like a comic book with a bulletin board system...

These are global and complexly interwoven problems. Any solution coming out from the game is going to be a locally optimized solution and if these were good, we would not be in the current fix.

Then there is the problem of implementation. The fix to global warming is easy: Stop burning all that fossil fuel. Unfortunately, we would needed to have implemented 10 years ago, what we did know 20 years ago. Now we will get global warming with hunger, war and death coming along and it is essentially too late to do

Everyone that looks upon humanity and calls it broken is a dictator wanting to be born. They want to meddle in people's lives, arrange them like so many dominos, and then proclaim the carnage they have created as fixed. I wish these madmen and madwomen for once would have the self honesty to admit that they are the ones that are broken, because they hate a free people.

Our leaders have failed to confront the fact that technology is eliminating jobs ever more quickly. We are fast reaching the point where pay checks will come from the government, machines will do the work, corporations will compete with ever more robotic produced goods.
The social pecking order must be preserved. Requiring that a portion of one's government check be wagered on game success would maintain our social structure. Play would be mandat

I've been trying to stare down, Chuck Norris style, this conundrum for the better part of a decade. Ultimately I end up back at Otto Jespersen's dictum that a problem is best canvassed from all sides, but, perhaps it's best to first know if the side you pick is from inside or outside the box. If you're inside the box, maybe it's your home in some back alley, and you're profoundly constrained by the conditions of the box, then, any possible side you choose in order to implement your solution, is still going

The barriers in the developing world are not things like poverty and disease; those are the symptoms. It's social problems like corruption, over-bearing governments, aristocrats with no sense of noblesse oblige to the common man, inefficient and ineffective legal systems and other things which make the development of those societies to western standards exceedingly difficult.

It's social problems like corruption, over-bearing governments, aristocrats with no sense of noblesse oblige to the common man, inefficient and ineffective legal systems and other things which make the development of those societies to western standards exceedingly difficult.

Many of these elements are measured in indexes of Economic Freedom, such as the Heritage / WSJ [heritage.org] index or the Fraser Institute [freetheworld.com] Economic Freedom of the World project.

Where you have poverty, disease, and low economic growth, you tend to hav

Those indexes are biased since they neglect key aspects of human happiness like community; health; external costs like pollution, systemic risk, and defense that businesses often pass on to society; and the corrupting effects of the concentraation of wealth in a few hands as the rich get richer -- things implicit in the original poster's comment.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality [wikipedia.org]

To me this is more simplistic, idealistic tripe. This is a more sophisticated variation of the stupid notion that love can save the world and we all just need to get along; something routinely conveyed in popular music. It's feel-good nonsense that provides no real solutions.

I'll grant you, the world does need these kind of idealists. This world would be a worse place without them. That said, all these problems have already been solved. Religion at it's core teaches humanity almost everything it needs know to solve these problems. Countless researchers and scientists have also devised innumerable practical solutions.

The problem, when it comes down to it, is human nature. These problems haven't been resolved and will never be resolved because of human nature. It doesn't matter what system of government or any other social system you impose on the people. People will find a way to exploit it. And far too often one group ends up being oppressed, financially, politically or socially, for the sake of another. Everything inevitably gets corrupted, including the aforementioned religion.

If people were totally selfless and honest we wouldn't even need a sociopolitical because all problems would solve themselves. But people aren't like that, so the most effective system is the one that accounts for human nature but is able to channel that energy in altruistic ways. Easier said than done. And of course this does nothing for disease which is something we'll be dealing with no matter how good people are to each other. It isn't a matter of saying fix it and it's done.

I had a friend who joined the peace corps who is now stationed in Honduras. She single-handedly created programs to improve the education of the youth within the village she worked. Problem was, while the kids enjoyed her work, she was the only one willing to offer help and continue the programs. Her time with the Peace Corps will be ending soon and she feels that she'll be leaving them in the state that they were before she got there. It's as if the folks in this particular village accepted aid but weren't